Willoughby. But, leaving this question, I am sure no sect which systematically secludes itself from every province of philosophy, literature, and art, can grow largely in numbers and in influence in a state of society like ours.
Gower. Our English Platonists contrast strongly, in this respect, with George Fox and his followers.
Willoughby. How incomprehensible must have been the rude fervour and symbolic prophesyings of the Quakers to the refined scholarship and retiring devotion of men like More and Norris, Gale and Cudworth. But can you call them mystics?
Atherton. Scarcely so, except in as far as Platonism is always in a measure mystical. A vein of mysticism peeps out here and there in their writings. Cold rationalism they hate. They warm, with a ready sympathy, to every utterance of the tender and the lofty in the aspirations of the soul. But their practical English sense shows itself in their instant rejection of sentimentalism, extravagance, or profanity. This is especially the case with More—as shrewd in some things as he was credulous in others, and gifted with so quick an eye for the ridiculous.
Gower. Delightful reading, those racy pages of his, running over with quaint fancies.
Atherton. More’s position as regards mysticism is, in the main, that of a comprehensive and judicial mind. He goes a considerable distance with the enthusiast,—for he believes that love for the supreme Beautiful and Good may well carry men out of themselves; but for fanatical presumption he has no mercy.[[383]]
Willoughby. The Romanist type of mysticism would be the most repugnant of all, I should think, to these somewhat free-thinking English scholars.
Atherton. So I have found. More has no notion of professing to give up his reason, like Poiret; still less of awaiting a suspension of our powers, like John of the Cross. He believes that ‘the Spirit doth accomplish and enlarge our humane faculties.’[[384]]
Gower. Yet Norris is less remote than More from the Romish mysticism, is he not? I mean that his Platonism seemed to me a little more monastic, and less philosophical.
Atherton. He has, it must be confessed, his four gradations of love—akin to the class-religion of the Romish Church;—as though a certain degree were incumbent on all Christians, but higher stages of devout affection (above mere duty) were set before the eminently religious.[[385]] Yet let us do full justice to the good sense of that excellent man. The Quietist doctrine of unconsciousness appears to him an unnatural refinement. He cannot conceive how it should be expected that a man was to be ‘such an America to himself,’ as not to know what his own wishes and attainments are. The infused virtue of the Spanish mystics appears to his discriminating eye ‘as great a paradox in divinity, as occult qualities in philosophy.‘[[386]]